Was Charlottesville a False Flag?

Was the unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday, August 12th a riot by white supremacists, as the Media has labeled it, or something even more sinister? Was it a false-flag attack orchestrated by the Left and Democrats to permanently damage the president and compel Americans to view everything through the lens of racism?

How the Media purposefully misreported the incident

In the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, the ever-Trump-unfriendly media has focused on the president’s failure to immediately call out those protesting the Robert E. Lee statue’s removal, many—but not all—of whom were white nationalists and neo-Nazis. On the day of the incident, he said, “‘We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,’ quoted the Los Angeles Times, “then, looking into the camera, he repeated, ‘On many sides.’”

After a storm of criticism for not calling out the Klan, et al., the next day the White House issued a statement saying “of course” the president had included in his condemnation “white supremacists, KKK, neo-Nazi and all extremist groups,” and that he “called for national unity and bringing all Americans together.” But the press continued to rip him for, as the LA Times put it, “not denouncing the far-right groups that initiated the violence, and the man who drove into a crowd of counter-protesters that left Heather Heyer dead.”

After again blasting “the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups,” on Monday, and the Media’s continued harsh criticism, Trump told the press on Tuesday, that he didn’t initially attack those groups because “unlike you,” he waited for the facts to come out before making a more specific call-out, and the death hadn’t occurred yet.

On Wednesday, August 16th the leftist Media berated the president throughout the day for saying there was violence on both sides—an indisputable fact. That fact has consistently been ignored—no, concealed—by the press. The front page of the Wall Street Journal, for example, on Thursday reported on CEOs deciding to dissolve one of Trump’s business councils and his dissolution of the other council, using the boldest headline on the page, screaming, “CEOs Scrap Trump Panels.”

The story said the CEOs made the decision after Trump’s Tuesday press conference “during which he appeared to apportion blame equally between white supremacy groups and counterprotesters.” No mention that the “counterprotesters” were largely composed of the violent far-left group Antifa, a group that arose in Germany where they worked with the government to demonize critics of Muslim migration. The name of the group was also omitted in a second story on page A5, also with the largest headline on the page: “Trump Remarks Rattle His Staff, Threaten Agenda.”

Readers had to flip to page A13, to find the truth about Charlottesville, in an opinion piece by Daniel Henninger:

It was a pitched battle between two organized mobs—the white nationalist groups on the right and the badly underreported Antifa, or “antifascist,” groups on the hard-as-stone left. Stories about Antifa’s organized violence are trickling out now, but there is no conceivable journalistic defense for having waited so long to inform the public about this dangerous movement.

The misreporting of the Charlottesville riot, casting it as a riot of the alt-right and neo-Nazis, has been used to cast the president as a racist for blaming both sides for the violence—even after having previously calling out the white supremacists, etc. For example, CNN’s Jim Acosta said “We saw the president’s true colors today, and I’m not sure they were red, white and blue.” This miscasting has been used to demand that conservatives like Bannon, Miller and Gorka be expelled from the White House.

In truth, it’s not at all settled that the “far-right groups” initiated the violence, unless just being labeled “alt-right” and being there in Charlottesville constitutes initiating violence. Jason Kessler, the organizer of the rally, called Unite the Right, indicated that his group was attacked by the Left, composed largely of Antifa, the same group that led a violent protest in DC on Inauguration Day and another in Berkeley, protesting Milo Yanopoulos.

Jordan Schachtel, in Conservative Review, characterizes Antifa as “an extremist, left-wing group,” that “has viciously beaten supporters of the president and attacked police officers, and Antifa’s mob violence has resulted in the destruction of private property nationwide.”

He reports that “Much of the mainstream Left has chosen to link up with radical, fringe organizations that agree with much of Antifa’s communist/socialist/anarchist ideology.

Their mission is to undermine the Trump Administration, he says; but of course, all of these groups mean to undermine capitalism.

And it seems that the police are making a practice of standing back and allowing Antifa to do as it pleases. What’s that all about?

The Wall Street Journal wrote, “Mr. Kessler contended that the police intentionally held back Saturday as counter-protestors attacked people trying to attend a rally to protest the removal of a statue of confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.” (The police also stood by and watched as protestors pulled down a century-old Confederate statue in Durham, NC the next day.)

“‘They were using aerosol cans as flamethrowers, they were pointing rifles at us, they were throwing bricks at our vehicles,’ Mr. Kessler said. ‘And the Charlottesville police department stood down and allowed it all to happen.’” A police spokesperson denied there was an order to stand down.

Another reporter described it this way:

“Hundreds and hundreds of Antifa, weird BLM, idiots dressed like clowns,” said Goldy, a reporter for the Canadian news site The Rebel.media. She continued:

The police failed to uphold the law. They failed to keep the opposing groups separate even when tensions ran red hot, and they failed to be present in the moments before the scene became deadly.

You see, the car attack was not the only horrific scene that day. There were countless incidents of illegal deployment of mace, guns drawn, sticks and flag poles used–and from left-wing demonstrators more often than the right.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The NY Times tweeted:

2. The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding "antifa" beating white nationalists being led out of the park 2/2

Even the ACLU said the police stood back and watched. Here are portions of a statement from the Virginia ACLU’s executive director, Claire Gastanaga:

We are horrified by the violence that took place in Charlottesville on Saturday and the tragic loss of life that resulted from it. The ACLU of Virginia does not support violence. We do not support Nazis. We support the Constitution and laws of the United States….

We asked the city to adhere to the U.S. Constitution and ensure people’s safety at the protest. It failed to do so.… Our role is to ensure that the system works the same for everyone….

It is the responsibility of law enforcement to ensure safety of both protesters and counter-protesters. The policing on Saturday was not effective in preventing violence. I was there and brought concerns directly to the secretary of public safety and the head of the Virginia State Police about the way that the barricades in the park limiting access by the arriving demonstrators and the lack of any physical separation of the protesters and counter-protesters on the street were contributing to the potential of violence. They did not respond. In fact, law enforcement was standing passively by, seeming to be waiting for violence to take place, so that they would have grounds to declare an emergency, declare an ‘unlawful assembly’ and clear the area. [Emphasis in the original.]

She also said that “An affidavit from the police chief said that they expected twice as many counter-protesters (2,000) as protesters (1,000).”

Since authorities expected Antifa to outnumber the statue protestors, questions arise about what the Virginia State Police reportedly did, after declaring an unlawful assembly, pursuant to a declared State of Emergency, presumably by the Democrat Virginia governor, Terry McAuliffe—a longtime Clinton ally. The Mayor of Charlottesville, Michael Signer, is also a Democrat.

Pax Dickinson, writing in a Daily Caller op-ed, lays out in detail the events leading up to the violence, including an easy-to-comprehend diagram overlaid on a Google Maps image. He was a speaker in Kessler’s group, which was confined by barriers into two pens, in the park. “The barricade layout was as police described to organizers it would be, and speakers received a briefing on this the day before.” Virginia State Police controlled the north, east and west sides of the park. “To the south was an uncontrolled chaos full of Antifa.”

He adds that “Contact between the two sides was isolated to those positions and relatively under control from my vantage point…Shortly after all rally attendees were present in the park, word began to spread that a State of Emergency had been declared, presumably by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe. At my position in Pen 2, people were confused by this. It seemed unnecessary and preemptive since the rally seemed fairly well under control at this point.”

After a few minutes, Dickinson wrote, Virginia State Police announced over a loudspeaker that they had been declared an unlawful assembly, and were instructed to leave the park or be arrested.

“We’re pushed through the barricade at the south end of 1st St. and onto Market St., which was lined on both sides with mobs of screaming Antifa with no police presence whatsoever. We ran west on Market St, running a gauntlet of Antifa throwing bottles, sticks, and rocks.”

Hawk Newsome, president of Black Lives Matter of Greater NY, told CNN: “The police actually allowed us to square off against each other,” Newsome said. “There were fights and the police were standing a block away the entire time. It’s almost as if they wanted us to fight each other.”

The insanity of what the VSP did, obviously under orders, points to a false flag.

I see this episode as the denial of First Amendment rights by state authorities and using Antifa to punish the group they disagreed with.

The First Amendment trashed

What has been forgotten, in the media-driven furor in the wake of the Charlottesville, VA violence is the First Amendment. The Constitution protects speech, so long as it doesn’t incite “imminent lawless action.” [Brandenburg v Ohio].

That protection includes hate speech, pursuant to the SCOTUS ruling, R.A.V. v City of St. Paul.

In that case, teenagers who had burned a cross on the lawn of a black family were charged under a local ordinance “which prohibits the display of a symbol which ‘arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender,’ said oyez.org. In short, though it may be odious, speech cannot be barred solely because of its content.

In R.A.V., the High Court added that “Government has no authority ‘to license one side of a debate to fight freestyle, while requiring the other to follow the Marquis of Queensbury Rules.’”

But that’s the very thing the Virginia and the city of Charlottesville did, last weekend. Why didn’t I didn’t mention that Kessler is a white supremacist, as the MSM has labeled him? Because it makes no difference: under the Constitution: he had a right to speak.

If you think the loathsome views of white supremacists and Nazis should be an exception to the First Amendment, answer this: Who decides what’s loathsome—Antifa? CAIR?

Photo credit: By Cville dog – Own work, Public Domain

Bob Bennett is a New York-based writer who has written op-eds for the Wall Street Journal and the NY Post, and has appeared on Fox and Friends and America’s Newsroom. He has traveled widely and written travel pieces for the NY Post, a cover article for the Jewish Press, and an op-ed for the medical journal Cancer Biotherapy & Radioimmunotherapy. Bob was also award-winning producer of a travel radio show heard on New York stations: WMCA, WNWK and 50,000 watt WOR and the national Sky Angel Network. He now blogs on Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Community and Red State Diaries.